Movies - TV
Tom Hardy Based Bane's Voice In The Dark Knight Rises On A Real-Life Legend
By LEE ADAMS
Tom Hardy is one of Britain’s most enigmatic actors, and he tends to tinker with accents while he prepares for roles. One of the most notable instances of experimenting with his voice was the actor’s role as hulking, masked supervillain Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises,” with Hardy drawing inspiration from a very unusual source.
Hardy explained, “Bane quintessentially is Latinx... of origin, and I’m not. So I looked at the concept of Latin and found a character, a gentleman, a man called Bartley Gorman, who’s a Romani gypsy, the King of the Gypsies.” Gorman was a bare-knuckle fighter who remained undefeated until his retirement 40 years later and would take on any challengers, even sparring with Muhammad Ali.
Hardy told Christopher Nolan, “We can either go down a Darth Vader kind of route, straight, neutral-toned villain voice, or we could try this... we’ve got to consider the roots and origins of Bane,” and Nolan chose to go with the Gorman accent. Linguist Eric Singer pointed out Hardy might not always nail the accent, but “I’m really impressed by the way he plays with intonation — the music of an accent.”